According to the World Economic Forum, researching to decide what to buy or do is the main reason for using social media. The number of people who use social media because many of their friends use it has fallen (-16%), as has the number of people who use social media to keep in touch with friends (-9%).
Networking for work (+9%), following celebrities and famous people in the news (+27%), and researching and finding products to buy (+30%) are trending as reasons for using social media. This last piece of information is noteworthy for church leaders, as people are clearly exploring and researching online, but increasingly, they are doing so through social media.
Most churches make one of two mistakes when it comes to marketing: they either don't advertise their church or their message in any way, or they don't advertise it effectively. When I was in church planting, the Internet wasn't a thing. If you were on the cutting edge, you were putting ads in the newspaper, making flyers, or using direct mail.
Unfortunately, many churches still use that approach, if they are making any marketing efforts at all. But because the majority of the unchurched community is accessible almost exclusively online, you need to rethink your church marketing.
We are here to talk about digital marketing.
Philip Kotler, known as the father of modern marketing, advocates for a revolution in the field of marketing that he calls Marketing 4.0. The first major change in marketing was the move from product-driven marketing (1.0) to customer-centric marketing (2.0) and then to human-centric marketing (3.0). The idea of Marketing 3.0 was to create products, services, and company culture that embrace and reflect human values.
But the digital revolution requires an entirely new approach that breaks away from all the traditional marketing that came before it. Just as the church's front door has gone digital, so has its outreach. It's easy to react negatively to “cool” churches with Instagrammable Bibles, TikTok preachers, and celebrity-powered churches, but “change is definitely afoot,” as one article put it. Y-Pulse“It's a shift in how religious organizations and individuals are trying to attract the support of the next generation. And by being more consistently present in the spaces where young people spend their time (social platforms), these efforts have the potential to attract supporters, even if they're only on their feeds and not in their church pews.”
There are three headings for online outreach: Your website remains the focal point. While an app serves people digitally, it's not how people explore your church, so your website needs to be your outreach hub.
Number 2, People will make a decision about your church digitally within seconds. This means you need to engage with them as soon as possible.
The third, The goal is clicks, not visits. A visit, whether in person or online, follows a click. Or as you may have heard the joke, “A click follows a brick.” The goal of the wall is to get people to find out about you online, most commonly through your website or online campus.
That last sentence is worth a bit of clarification: you're not using digital marketing to drive a physical visit. It might sound counterintuitive, but think of it as guiding someone step-by-step toward a specific action.
In various speaking engagements, I have often presented this idea to people. I walk up to a table and ask, “How many of you can jump and land on this?” Very few can. But I bring a chair to the table and ask, “How many of you can step on this chair first, and then step from the chair onto the table?” Most people can do that. And I make the simple point that when we ask unchurched people to attend in person as a first step to get to know us, we are asking them to jump and land on the table. An online invitation should be to step on the chair first.
So how do you do that?
While there is still room for traditional marketing (for example, mailings to new residents’ addresses), the real penetration will come from digital marketing.
As our church's marketing director says, we meet consumers where they are – online. We use a combination of different media that work together to maximize impressions. This includes running paid search campaigns on all search engines, not just Google, so that our site appears at the top of the search page when anyone, from anywhere, searches for us directly, searches for our church, or searches for any of the keywords we use. We run retargeting display campaigns so that people who search for us or visit our website are shown future ads as a result of their initial interest.
With traditional radio in decline, we are focusing on digital radio advertising with a combination of Pandora, Spotify, iHeart Radio and Sirius XM, which is much more targeted than traditional radio. Research showed us that our target demographic spends most of their time on digital video, especially YouTube, so we invested significant outreach efforts in that medium.
We also run YouTube-focused pre-roll campaigns to get in front of people we want to attract attention. Several times a year, we use our own database to send email marketing campaigns to everyone who has given us permission to contact them over the years. Because we don't purchase email lists, we know that everyone who receives our email communications has some interest or experience with Meck.
Finally, we run social media campaigns (different than just promoting a post) primarily on Facebook and Instagram, running tests to determine where we get the most attention.
All these mediums and cross-device technologies allow us to reach more people, at more times, on more devices, and again, all of these efforts are done with the unchurched in mind.
If all this sounds “big,” think again. Financially, digital marketing is much cheaper than traditional marketing methods like newspaper ads and direct mail. Plus, most sites like Google have online tutorials and simple step-by-step guidelines to help you get started. While the terminology may be intimidating, the actual practice of digital marketing isn't.
Many of these marketing activities are less expensive than you might think, but more importantly, they are good, effective investments.
James Emery White
Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Tanankorn Pilong
Release date: July 25, 2024
James Emery White is the founder and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he served as the school's fourth president. His latest book is: Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian Digital Ageis available on Amazon or at your local bookstore. For a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org. Browse past blogs in the archives, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture podcast. Follow @JamesEmeryWhite on X, Facebook, and Instagram.
